Tuesday morning, the Georgia Green Party filed with the Elections Division for the Georgia Secretary of State’s office a nomination petition consisting of 1,672 pages of signatures from Georgia voters. State Party leadership are extending their appreciation to dozens of petition circulators from around and beyond Georgia who collected signatures in the hot Georgia Summer sun. The filing provides a comfortable margin beyond the 7,500 signatures threshold imposed by Order of Judge Richard Story who on March 17th struck down as unconstitutional the application of the Georgia Election Code to deny access to the state ballot for Presidential campaigns of emerging political parties.

“Our earlier ballot access victory in court made possible this ballot access vistory in the streets, and makes possible our next ballot access victory at the polls,” said Hugh Esco, cochair of the Georgia Green Party. The Georgia Election Code provides for a means to retain a ballot line, avoiding the cost of repeated petition drives. A political party which delivers for their state-wide candidate the vote of 1% of the registered voters of the state may nominate by convention its candidates for state-wide office for the next four years.

On Sunday and Monday, volunteers gathered petition pages from circulators throughout the state and drove them to Atlanta. A desk was setup in the living room of Carrie Williams, who joined the state committee at the Party’s 2016 Nominating Convention held in Macon this past June 4th. The desk hosted a notary public who worked from 11:00 am Monday until 1:00 am Tuesday morning notarizing petitions for a stream of volunteers and contractors who rolled through to drop off their signatures. The kitchen table was pressed into service to prepare the pages for filing. And on Tuesday morning, though sleep deprived, state committee members Bruce Dixon, Hugh Esco and Carrie Williams along with party volunteer Danielle Coates were on hand to file the petition well ahead of the 12:00 noon filing deadline.

Georgia Green Party leadership are promising an aggressive campaign to elect Georgia’s Stein Electors to the Electoral College and to defeat Governor Deal’s so-called Opportunity School District constitutional amendment. “We call on all Georgians to step up and help us transform this breaking point into a tipping point with a demonstration of our collective political power,” said Bruce Dixon, cochair of the Party.

Stein has shared lessons in electoral math on the campaign trail where she claims that votes of debt-burdoned students alone would be sufficient for her to win a three-way race. Where her political opponents have supported the banker-bailouts costing $8 trillion or more. Stein has promised a $1.3 trillion program to forgive student debt and to make a publicly funded college education available for every student willing to do the work. She has campaigned to make wars for oil obsolete with Green New Deal emergency measures of public employment to address the global climate crisis and convert the nation to a solar economy. Stein supports the Green Party’s demand for a Medicare-for-all program to make health care universally accessible, as it is in the rest of the industrial world. The long standing position of the Green Party was urged on the Democrat Party by Sanders appointees to the corporate party’s Platform Committee, which rejected the proposal in deference to their corporate funders, just last week.